thoughts (and links) of a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....

what you get here

This is not a blog which expresses instant opinions on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers as jumping-off points for some reflections about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

Friday, October 31, 2014

My
apologies for the minimal posts of the past fortnight – I was moving from the
attic flat I had in central Sofia to a somewhat larger one just down from
General Dondukov Bvd and off Vasil Levski – but another “period” piece, this
one from the early 1930s and the building (housing a café which is the haunt of
the locals - and 3 flats) still owned by the family whose grandfather built it.

Then,
on Sunday, a snowy drive through Bulgaria to Bucharest for car servicing and,
Wednesday, to the mountain house which had, amazingly, seen no snow.

In
Bucharest I got back into Leonard Woolf’s spell-binding 5-volume auto-biography
– following this time his discovery and mapping of the British cooperative
movement 100 years ago – and the powerful role played in its educational system
by working class women.

It
brought back memories of the Cooperative Society in my home town of Greenock in
the 1960s – basically the complex of shops, funeral parlour and insurance which
was the staple of working class life for so many decades in the West of
Scotland; and the great community spirit evident particularly amongst the women
in the housing schemes I represented in the late 60s through to 1990. Women
were the backbone of the tenant associations and various self-help schemes –
including a famous adult education one which is described in this big study –
The Making of an Empowering Profession

That,
in turn, got us talking about the absence of such a spirit in 20th
century Romania; its decline in the UK; but its continued strength elsewhere.

There
was a (very) brief moment in the early 90s when cooperatives were talked about –
at least in some places – as one of the models which might be relevant for the
central European economies but market “triumphalism” swept all away….killing an
opportunity which has been taken in other countries as well set out in this
short paper “Cooperative Enterprise Development after 30 years of destructive neo-liberalism”

Friday, October 24, 2014

Celebrations,
I suspect, will be muted. How far we have fallen since those heady days – when
so many intellectuals and politicians were celebrating not only the defeat of
communism but “the end of history”

There
was always a significant minority of people who dissented from this Panglossian
view and tried to remind us of the cyclical nature of things; and to warn of
the arrogance, indeed hubris, involved in our assumptions about “progress” -
what John Gray called recently “melioristic liberalism”

Whatever
their position on the political spectrum, almost all of those who govern us
hold to some version of the melioristic liberalism that is the west’s default
creed, which teaches that human civilisation is advancing – however falteringly
– to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left
behind.According
to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but
a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently
improved…………….

The
most violent century in human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for
the “bland fanatics of western civilisation”, as Niebuhr called them at the
height of the cold war, “who regard the highly contingent achievements of our
culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.

Niebuhr
was critiquing a fundamentalist creed that has coloured our view of the world for
more than a century: that western institutions of the nation-state and liberal
democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and that the aspiring
middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about accountable,
representative and stable governments – that every society, in short, is
destined to evolve just as the west did.

Critics
of this teleological view, which defines “progress” exclusively as development
along western lines, have long perceived its absolutist nature. Secular
liberalism, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen cautioned as early
as 1862, “is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world
but of this”. But it has had many presumptive popes and encyclicals: from the
19th-century dream of a westernised world long championed by the Economist, in
which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, to Henry Luce’s
proclamation of an “American century” of free trade, and “modernisation theory”
– the attempt by American cold warriors to seduce the postcolonial world away
from communist-style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer
capitalism and democracy.

The
collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened Niebuhr’s bland
fanatics. The old Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Francis Fukuyama’s
influential end-of-history thesis, and cruder theories about the inevitable
march to worldwide prosperity and stability were vended by such Panglosses of
globalisation as Thomas
Friedman. Arguing that people privileged enough to consume McDonald’s
burgers don’t go to war with each other, the New York Times columnist was not
alone in mixing old-fangled Eurocentrism with American can-doism, a doctrine
that grew from America’s uninterrupted good fortune and unchallenged power in
the century before September 2001.

The
terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised
by capital and consumption. But the shock to naive minds only further
entrenched in them the intellectual habits of the cold war – thinking through
binary oppositions of “free” and “unfree” worlds – and redoubled an old delusion:
liberal democracy, conceived by modernisation theorists as the inevitable
preference of the beneficiaries of capitalism, could now be implanted by force
in recalcitrant societies. Invocations of a new “long struggle” against
“Islamofascism” aroused many superannuated cold warriors who missed the
ideological certainties of battling communism.

Intellectual narcissism
survived, and was often deepened by, the realisation that economic power had
begun to shift from the west. The Chinese, who had “got capitalism”, were,
after all, now “downloading western apps”, according to Niall
Ferguson. As late as 2008, Fareed Zakaria declared in his much-cited book,
The Post-American
World, that “the rise of the rest is a consequence of American ideas and
actions” and that “the world is going America’s way”, with countries “becoming
more open, market-friendly and democratic”.

One
event after another in recent months has cruelly exposed such facile
narratives. China, though market-friendly, looks further from democracy than
before. The experiment with free-market capitalism in Russia has entrenched a
kleptocratic regime with a messianic belief in Russian supremacism.
Authoritarian leaders, anti-democratic backlashes and rightwing extremism
define the politics of even such ostensibly democratic countries as India, Israel,
Sri Lanka, Thailand and Turkey.

The
atrocities of this summer in particular have plunged political and media elites
in the west into stunned bewilderment and some truly desperate cliches. The
extraordinary hegemonic power of their ideas had helped them escape radical
examination when the world could still be presented as going America’s way. But
their preferred image of the west – the idealised one in which they sought to
remake the rest of the world – has been consistently challenged by many
critics, left or right, in the west as well as the east.

John
Gray’s article picks up the argument -

It’s
in the Middle East, however, that the prevailing liberal worldview has proved
most consistently misguided. At bottom, it may be western leaders’ inability to
think outside this melioristic creed that accounts for their failure to learn
from experience. After more than a decade of intensive bombing, backed up by
massive ground force, the Taliban continue to control much of Afghanistan and
appear to be regaining ground as the American-led mission is run down. Libya –
through which a beaming David Cameron processed in triumph only three years
ago, after the use of western air power to help topple Gaddafi – is now an
anarchic hell-hole that no western leader could safely visit.

One might think
such experiences would be enough to deter governments from further exercises in
regime change. But our leaders cannot admit the narrow limits of their power.
They cannot accept that by removing one kind of evil they may succeed only in
bringing about another – anarchy instead of tyranny, Islamist popular theocracy
instead of secular dictatorship. They need a narrative of continuing advance if
they are to preserve their sense of being able to act meaningfully in the
world, so they are driven again and again to re-enact their past
failures………………….

But
it is John Michael Greer’s weekly blogpost which really puts the boot in on the
intellectual naivety which has been assaulting our ears and eyes since the
middle of the last century. Greer has been too easily cast as an “apocalyptist”
but has written some profound books for which his latest post is a good taster. To many, the scenarios he paints about the next century may seem far-fetched - but few people would have predicted from the optimism which greeted the dawn of the 20th century that it would have gone so badly. Why do we think we are any different?

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Last Friday I suddenly decided to
see if another suitable rented flat was available in central Sofia - now that
my tenancy of the past 2 years is ending. The third time I’ve had to move in 7
years – my flat has been so popular that the different owners wanted it for
themselves!

I’m
very particular – liking only “period” accommodation, with space, “character”
and original features. And ideally in a less than fashionable area.

The
fates were smiling……it took me less than an hour to find the place – and I make
the move tomorrow…..

Our
fixation with novelty, for example, means that we click out of a blog if it is
has not been updated - instead of scrolling down to look at “older posts” which
may actually be far more interesting than this week’s!

But
we don’t hesitate to read the same posts if they appear in a new book! So - as
my blog works from the present backwards….I thought it useful to reverse the
sequence and offer the posts of the past 5 years in book form – in 5 volumes to be precise….

Friday, October 17, 2014

One
of my closest friends has been working in Sierra Leone for the past 18 months –
as Team Leader of a civil service reform project in Freetown. He is back home
in Brussels at the moment but scheduled to fly back in a few days – to take up
a project extension of 12 months.

Remember
that this is the country in the eye-storm of the Ebola pandemic where deaths
are doubling every month – as set out in this powerful piece
in the current issue of LRB

I
remonstrated with him but he had a powerful argument. He has earned the
confidence of senior civil servants there – and they need the unique blend he
has of experience, common sense and
analytical skills. I don’t anyone in my line of work who is able to come
up so readily with “stories” which make so much sense about the perversities
which are perpetrated by the leaders of modern organisations (whether private
or public). I worked – very briefly – in The World Health Organisation (WHO) in
1990/91 and was generally very impressed with how much its European Office (in
Copenhagen) was able to achieve with minimal resources. But it had its
weaknesses – a few of its nationals appointed (on patronage) were disastrous
and that, according to a
leaked report in today’s Guardian, seems to be the case for its African
desk.I remember his (unrepeatable) comments from our skype conversation a couple of months ago.I salute a brave manAnd wish him a safe return.......

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

We
don’t need anyone these days to tell us that we’re in a mess. Nor to explain
why. The libraries are groaning with books on globalization, deregulation,
privatization, debt, greed, corruption, pollution, austerity, migration.

I’m
reminded of a wave of books in the 1970s which were early harbingers of this
sense of crisis - The Seventh Enemy (1978)
was a typical example. It described the 7 main threats to human survival as the
population explosion, food shortage, scarcity of natural resources, pollution,
nuclear energy, uncontrolled technology - and human nature.

The
author’s experience of government and international institutions convinces him
that the most dangerous was the moral blindness of people and the inertia of
political institutions.

A
lot has happened in the subsequent 46 years – new pressing issues have been
identified –but who would gainsay his identification of the “seventh” enemy?
These days, there would probably be a majority in favour of stringing up a few
bankers, politicians and economists – “pour encourager le autres” – were it not
illegal…

If,
however, the problem has been defined, diagnosed and satisfactorily explained –
why do we remain so confused and divided if not, in many cases, apathetic about
the action we should be taking?

Over
the years, I’ve read and collected books and articles to help me identify the
sort of agenda and actions which might unite a fair-minded majority.

Like
many people, I’ve clicked, skimmed and saved – but rarely gone back to read thoroughly.
The folders in which they have collected have had various names – such as
“urgent reading” or “what is to be done” – but rarely accessed. Occasionally I
remember one and blog about it.

Only
now with the new website – have I the incentive to attempt a more serious
trawl, a more sustained read and more systematic search for a common agenda.

I’ve
started to uplaod a couple of dozen of "key readings" – most reasonably well-known names but a few
outliers….one of which is From Chaos to
Change – entering a new era – a remarkable, detailed manifesto for change
written by a Dutch veteran of earlier struggles, Joost van Steenis, who is one of only a few activists to have taken and time and trouble to write not
one but several detailed manifestos. It can be downloaded in its entirety from
the site.

This post is actually the text of the introduction to what I was going to call "the library" but I may now entitle "Readings for social change" - which will probably be one of two separate libraries, the other being "Readings for organisational change"?

Thursday, October 9, 2014

It’s
rather a coincidence that the Nobel Prize for Literature is announced the very
day I wanted to complete a post about the question which has been exercising me
these last few days - namely what makes for good writing.

I
have been editing about 20 of the pieces I have written and put on the old
website in the past 5 years - and discovered a short paper I had done for some
students (at the Central Asian University in Bishkek) on how to write a paper.

Of
course, that’s not quite the same thing as writing a novel! But some of the
same questions about standards and power seem to apply. What exactly are the
qualifications of the panel for deciding who will gain this prestigious (and
generous) award? And what precise criteria do they use? I’m generally fairly bewildered
by the
awards – although I’m not a great fan of novels. But I do like quality
writing and have to say that I have read only 3 of the Nobel prize-winners of
the last 10 years – Pamuk, Vargas Llosa and Coetze. Few of the other 7 seem all
that deserving…..

Anyway,
for the past week, I have been doing three things

·Writing
a 1-2 page “blurb” for the 15 Papers or Essays (which are on average 60 pages
long)

·Writing
a slightly longer intro to the 8 E-books which will be on the new website in a
week or so

·Re-formatting
all of the material

This
has involved recollecting the circumstances which brought this writing into
being – and reflecting on my writing style and structure. So I’m now hooked on
a major rewrite of the paper on writing reports – which is directed at
officials and students facing a stroppy boss or supervisor and interested in
the process of creation. Normally I sit with the laptop and let the keys do the
thinking – as the phrases and sentences appear on the screen, I question them
and am led into some unexpected but fruitful fields. Just as happens when I’m
doing a presentation to a group and ask them initially to give me some
questions…… In both cases, ideas appear which I hadn't previously thought of...

But
this time, I operated even more creatively…some months ago I had bought a very
large artist’s sketchpad which can stand on the floor like an easel. With a
fine felt pen I just scribble phrases in large script and then tear the page
off and leave on the floor like a post-it note….

Alternating
between this and the laptop has proved to be quite effective….

Why
is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form,
or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home
network?

The
most popular explanation is that opaque prose is a deliberate choice.
Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers
get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who
turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide
the fact that they have nothing to say, hoping to bamboozle their audiences
with highfalutin gobbledygook.But
the bamboozlement theory makes it too easy to demonize other people while
letting ourselves off the hook. In explaining any human shortcoming, the first
tool I reach for is Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is
adequately explained by stupidity.

The
kind of stupidity I have in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low IQ; in
fact, it's often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most from it.

I
once attended a lecture on biology addressed to a large general audience at a
conference on technology, entertainment and design. The lecture was also being
filmed for distribution over the Internet to millions of other laypeople. The
speaker was an eminent biologist who had been invited to explain his recent
breakthrough in the structure of DNA. He launched into a jargon-packed
technical presentation that was geared to his fellow molecular biologists, and
it was immediately apparent to everyone in the room that none of them
understood a word and he was wasting their time. Apparent to everyone, that is,
except the eminent biologist. When the host interrupted and asked him to
explain the work more clearly, he seemed genuinely surprised and not a little
annoyed. This is the kind of stupidity I am talking about.

The
“curse of knowledge” is the single best explanation of why good people write
bad prose. It simply doesn't occur to the writer that her readers don't know
what she knows—that they haven't mastered the argot of her guild, can't divine
the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a
scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn't bother to
explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail…….

This
is good stuff and what follows echoes exactly what my own draft said all these
years ago -

How
can we lift the curse of knowledge? The traditional advice—always remember the
reader over your shoulder—is not as effective as you might think. None of us
has the power to see everyone else's private thoughts, so just trying harder to
put yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't make you much more accurate in
figuring out what that person knows. But it's a start. So for what it's worth:
Hey, I'm talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject
than you think, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don't, you
are guaranteed to confuse them.

A
better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to close the loop, as the
engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers—that is,
show a draft to some people who are similar to your intended audience and find
out whether they can follow it. Social psychologists have found that we are
overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer
what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we
ask those people do we discover that what's obvious to us isn't obvious to
them.

The
other way to escape the curse of knowledge is to show a draft to yourself,
ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar. If
you are like me you will find yourself thinking, "What did I mean by
that?" or "How does this follow?" or, all too often, "Who
wrote this crap?" The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely
the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. Advice on
writing is not so much advice on how to write as on how to revise.

My
only quibble is with his title – there are a lot of style books out there but I
don’t think that’s what he’s actually talking about. He seems rather to be
addressing the more crucial issue of how we structure our thinking and present
it so clearly that the reader or listener understands and is actually motivated
to do something with the insights…..

Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what
exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors
(and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of critical
thinking. One
of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics
and the English language”
Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric are
calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense
undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held
accountable for them.

Fifty
years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose
pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column,
attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The
Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for
example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls
coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics
infused his work – bit it did not amount to a coherent statement about power.

And
the Plain English website is the
other source I would recommend. It contains their short but very useful manual;
a list of alternative words; and lists of all the organisations which have
received their awards.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

I
am a great reader – and fairly prolific writer. Indeed at one point, my
secretary in the 1980s called me “paperback writer” in an
allusion to the Beatles song. And I have indeed tried my hand at various times
with (self-published) little books – one written in the 1970s around 30 or so
questions about a new system of local government (for community activists); the
second a more autobiographical piece drafted for more therapeutic purposes to
help me make sense of my life; and the last - In
Transit - a collection of papers I put together to give to people I was
working with in central Europe and Asia. This last I suppose was a calling card
of a sort.

What
I don’t understand about most academic and bureaucratic writing is that it is
so lifeless….it seems designed to cast a disinfectant over our living souls and
kill the bugs of creativity and insight… I have been exceptionally lucky since
1970 - in holding first political positions (and then consultancy roles) which
allowed me to observe the processes of government at first hand; and then being
allowed the freedom to reflect quite openly about this to those who cared to
read such reflections…

I
have always found two collections of essays particularly inspiring – those of
the development writer Robert
Chambers and those of Roger
Harrison - the organizational development consultant.

Both
produced collections whose essays were preceded with detailed notes explaining
the conditions in which the essay was drafted and indicating how the writer had
adjusted his thinking…..

And
this morning, I stumbled across another name we should honour for the quality
and openness of his mind - and writing. Neil Postman died in 2003 but I
still remember him for his critique of television - Amusing Ourselves to Death.
It was actually a tribute I
came across

I sense a dwindling number
of people in the academic world who are unclassifiable. Neil Postman, who died in
2003 was one, and now we can say he will always be one. Such figures—with
reputation but no real discipline—have a tendency to make people think. Postman
had that.He was expert in nothing.
Therefore nothing was off limits. Therefore one’s mind was always at risk, from
a joke, a headline, an idea, a person walking through the door. The only way to
respond to such strange conditions was with ready humor. And humor would bring
you more ideas.

Now what discipline, what
department is that?Everyone who knew
Postman—and I include perhaps a hundred thousand who only heard him speak—knew
him first through humor, which was the reflection in person of the satire in
most of his books, each of which is a pamphlet, an essay between
covers: The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) was satire about the
infantalization in American culture. Amusing Ourselves to
Death (1985) was satire about
entertainment and what it was doing to us. Technopoly (1993)
was satire on the “surrender of culture to technology.”

In
these days of grey specialisation, such qualities deserve celebration!

His,
of course, was not the only voice to warn against the new technology….

Sunday, October 5, 2014

I’m now doing some final work on the new website –
whose name is still “Mapping the Common Ground – ways of thinking about the crisis”.
Today – apart from a cycle to the Loran Gallery to see its nice little exhibition of Socialist Realist
painting – has been devoted to doing summaries of about 15 of the extended
essays which will be one feature of the site. Another feature will be about 10 little
E-books I’ve produced in the past year…….

The
Independence Argument was the most recent – although it will be an updated
version that is uploaded in a week or so. I’m also planning an E-book of 100
pages incorporating the various posts I’ve done on EC Structural Funds and Good
Governance; and also one on the Romanian painting greats…….

I consider myself a fortunate man – given
opportunities to take part in the mysteries of governing for almost 50 years -
and not succumbing to cynicism. Essentially – I suspect – because I’ve played
several professional roles since I left university –

·22 years of strategic
leadership in first local and then regional government overlapping with 17
years teaching (latterly in urban management) followed by

·almost 25 years of
consultancy to governments and state bodies of the transition countries of
central Europe and central Asia.

Each of these roles has confronted me with a
conundrum which kept me exploring – in both real and virtual places - questions
such as

·how local professionals and
politicians could develop a different sort of relationship with particularly
“marginalised” groups

·the role of external
advisers in countries trying to create pluralist systems in ex-communist
countries

·how what is called
“institutional capacity” can be built

Since 1970 I’ve tried to make sense of the
challenges I’ve been involved with by writing about them – relating the various
projects to the wider literature in the field – and sometimes being lucky
enough to have the results published. This way I have certain “reality checks”
on the way I was seeing and thinking about things along the way.

We have a saying - “Those who can, do – those who
can’t, teach”.

And it’s certainly true that leaders of
organisations do not make good witnesses about the whys and wherefores of the
business they’re in. Most political and business autobiographies are shallow and
self-serving. Even with the best of intentions, it seems almost impossible for
an active executive to distance himself from the events which (s)he’s been
involved in to be able to explain properly events – let alone draw out general
lessons which can help others. An interesting exercise would be to identify
(for Britain) the most important political and managerial autobiographies of
(say) the last 50 years to try to (dis)prove the point. Denis Healey’s 1985
autobiography probably rates as the best of its genre. My friend Des Wilson has produced not only a very readable one ("Memoirs of a Minor Public Figure") but, earlier this year, a hilarious take on his age - "Growing Old - the last campaign"

But, on the other side, can the teachers actually
teach? Academic books and articles about the reform of government have churned
from the press in ever larger numbers over the last 50 years (See my “annotated
bibliography for change agents”). Do they tell a convincing story? More to the
point, do they actually help the aspiring reformer? Or do they, rather, confuse
him and her – whether by style, length or complexity? Indeed, how many of them
are actually written to help the reformer – as distinct from making an academic
reputation?

Perhaps the most insightful writing has been some
of the intellectual (auto)biographies which have come recently from a few sociologists
and political scientists eg Richard Rose….Daladier

This (unfinished) 40-page paper of mine is therefore
a fairly unusual endeavour in coming from a self-avowed “change agent” who has
also tried to keep up with “the literature” and also to reflect critically on
what he (and funders) were doing.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Despite my blogging habits and two websites, I’m
actually a bit of an “old-fogey” as far as technology is concerned. I’m not on
Facebook; would never Twitter or Tweet; use the most basic Nokia mobiles;
rarely skype; and prefer to ask human beings for directions rather than use
GPS.

I’ve been vaguely aware of the various arguments
about whether the internet has been good or bad for us but have resisted the
temptation to read the hundreds of books on the subject – apart from Jeff Jarvis’What would Google Do? which I
wrote about all of 3
years ago

Efgeni
Morozov, however, is a name I recognised when I popped in yesterday to the
local branch of Knigomania
and his To
Save Everything, Click Here looked precisely the sort of book to bring me
up to date with the debate – not least because of its extensive bibliography.

I found it an easy read – although an editor’s pen
would have been a useful corrective to his rather ornate phrases. I know this
is an ungenerous comment to make about a young Belarussian made good (the
review in the Times Higher Education Supplement link above ends with a good
profile of the guy) but he does rather ask for it since he devotes part of his critique to the notion of "gatekeeping"! The best of the reviews of the book is probably this one in
the Los
Angeles Review of Books

To understand the
limitations of technocratic approaches to social problems, he reads in communication
studies and political philosophy. To provide a context for his interpretation
of the dominant Internet myth, Morozov draws on key works in the history,
sociology, and anthropology of science and technology. The bibliography is
diverse, ranging from the canonical debate between John Dewey and Walter
Lippman on the role of expertise in democracy. This type of synthetic work is
all too rare in cultural criticism, and there is an excellent reading list
embedded in the endnotes of To Save Everything, Click Here. If Morozov’s
argument rings true — and, for the most part, it does — it is due to the strong
philosophical foundation on which he stands.

"To Save Everything" is
animated by a thoroughgoing critique of two central ideas that Morozov terms
“solutionism” and “Internet-centrism.” The first describes an instrumental
engagement with public life that regards all social and political issues as
problems to be solved. The second refers to a fascination with the Internet as
a wholly novel sociotechnical phenomenon (which Morozov first diagnosed in his
2011 book The Net Delusion). Solutionism and Internet-centrism are both
worldviews infused with the technocratic values of efficiency, cleanliness, and
productivity, values that are poorly suited, in Morozov’s view, to life in a
pluralistic liberal democracy.

These terms allow Morozov
to take a position outside the usual pro–con debates over digital technology.
Rather than participate in the kind of either-or thinking characteristic of
questions like “Is Google making us stupid?” (the title of an infamous
2008 Atlantic article by Nicholas G. Carr), Morozov explores the
underlying assumptions that make such a question possible in the first place.
Across an exhaustive — and, at times, exhausting — review of the recent
technology literature, he traces a persistent, unexamined reiteration of the
dominant Internet myth……

Morozov pinpoints the
mantra of today’s solutionism in the recurring description of entrenched
institutions as “broken”: Education is broken; the Postal Service is broken;
Wall Street is broken; Congress is broken. This solutionist Mad Lib is
especially prevalent in the discourses of Silicon Valley where start-up
founders are encouraged to pitch to potential investors in terms of the
problems they plan to solve. Indeed, writes Morozov, “Silicon Valley is already
awash with plans for improving just about everything under the sun: politics,
citizens, publishing, cooking.” But not all organizations can or should be
modeled after a Silicon Valley start-up: “Most public institutions should not
be held to the same standards as their private counterparts,” since “their
mission is to provide goods and services that markets cannot or should not
provide.” Such institutions will almost inevitably appear “broken” when judged
according to the bottom-line economic measures favoured by business-minded
solutionists: efficiency, for instance, or productivity. …..

Across 350 pages, he leads
the reader on a relentless march through the weeds of Internet-centric hype, criss-crossing
technologies and contexts as diverse as open government, gamification and crime
prediction, the quantified self and serendipity engines. It is a strange sort
of quest that feels almost compulsive in its pursuit of the bugbears of
technological solutionism and Internet-centrism. The result is a relatively
short book that simply feels too long, its comprehensiveness sliding into
redundancy as the examples pile up. One wonders if it was necessary to attack
every single instance of Internet-centrism? Following a lengthy engagement with
the “datasexuals” of the Quantified Self movement in chapter seven, going after
Gordon Bell’s “lifelogging” practices felt particularly tedious at the start of
chapter eight. Surely some targets are more worthy than others. …..

The critique of efficiency
and productivity in the foreground of To Save Everything builds on a
commitment to deliberative democracy that undergirds much of the book.
Deliberation, Morozov points out, is quintessentially inefficient. Bringing people
with different backgrounds and commitments together for the purpose of reaching
a mutually satisfying agreement is a slow and messy and often frustrating
process. Whereas solutionism assumes the possibility of consensus and
unanimity, Morozov champions compromise. “Perfection shouldn’t be pursued for
its own ends; democracy is a complex affair in which, in the absence of
disappointments, there would never be any accomplishments.”

About Me

Can be contacted at bakuron2003@yahoo.co.uk
Political refugee from Thatcher's Britain (or rather Scotland) who has been on the move since 1991. First in central Europe - then from 1999 Central Asia and Caucasus. Working on EU projects - related to building capacity of local and central government. Home base is an old house in the Carpathian mountains and Sofia

about the blog

Writing in my field is done by academics - and gives little help to individuals who are struggling to survive in or change public bureaucracies. Or else it is propoganda drafted by consultants and officials trying to talk up their reforms. And most of it covers work at a national level - whereas most of the worthwhile effort is at a more local level. The restless search for the new dishonours the work we have done in the past. As Zeldin once said - "To have a new vision of the future it is first necessary to have new vision of the past".I therefore started this blog to try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history - particularly in the endeavour of what used to be known as "social justice". My generation believed that political activity could improve things - that belief is now dead and that cynicism threatens civilisationI also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time or inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. Why are we here? What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge - but what used to be known, rather sexistically, as "wine, women and song" - for me now in the autumn of my life as wine, books and art....

quotes

“I will act as if what I do makes a difference”
William James 1890.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"
JM Keynes (1935)

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes"
JR Saul (1992)

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning - learning about · oneself
· learning about things
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"
E. Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" (1973) and Guide for the Perplexed (1977))

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell, 1950

Followers

der arme Dichter (Carl Spitzweg)

my alter ego

the other site

In 2008 I set up a website in the (vain) hope of developing a dialogue around issues of public administration reform - particularly in transition countries where I have been living and working for the past 26 years. The site is www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform and contains the major papers I have written over the years about my attempts to reform various public organisations in the various roles which I've had - politician; academic/trainer; consultant.